Regardless of what we do to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, the climate will continue to change and become more challenging into the indefinite future. The goals now are twofold: reduce the weight of those impacts (mitigation) and find ways to cope with what’s coming (adaptation).

The recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report (October 2018) makes it very clear that if we do not mitigate the impacts, the consequences will be profound, making adaptation extremely difficult and suffering more profound. This is supported by a recent report from the London School of Economics: existing economic risks are vastly underestimated.

For this reason, climate change is often referred to as a ‘risk multiplier’. For example, changing weather patterns are leading to more beech masts, which in turn leads to a population explosion of rats, mice, and stoats.

Climate change also is creating new and unexpected threats. For example, braided river birds like wrybills migrate to the Firth of Thames estuary for winter. That estuary and many others are threatened by rising sea levels. Black-fronted terns also migrate to the coast for winter, flying out to sea to feed on fish, but ocean acidification and changes in oceanic currents already are threatening the oceanic food web. Disease is also a new threat as pathogens once killed by cold weather now spread into new warming areas.